(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for fairly allocating resource to network users.
(b) Description of the Related Art
Recently, an attempt to expand a network bandwidth has been continuously conducted with the development of a transmission technology such as high-speed Internet. In addition, the Internet service users have request differentiated services to receive high-quality of assured services for each flow, depending on application services requesting service quality assurance such as Internet broadcasting, voice over IP (VoIP), virtual private network, etc., due to the development of various Internet multimedia contents. Therefore, a technology for assuring service quality in the Internet network has appeared as an important issue.
As a result, in the Internet network, methods for fair network resource allocation while assuring a bandwidth to support service applications having various requirements in addition to a best effort service type have been proposed.
Generally, a method used to fairly allocate network resources to users generates profiles for each user and provides user authentication, bandwidth allocation, quality of service (QoS) function by using the profile. However, when there are many users, the profiles should be generated as much as the number of users. Therefore, the process is complicated and extra bandwidth (for example: static bandwidth allocation) should be previously allocated to users that do not access the network, such that the network bandwidth is wasted.
In addition, since it is difficult to manage the complicated profile, maintenance cost for services is increased. Therefore, it is difficult to receive the QoS requirements in the above-mentioned environment. In particular, the profile is more complicated when IP is dynamically allocated by dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP).
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.